HBO’s Rich-Family-in-Peril Drama Succession Has a Troubling Allure

Sure, we all want to eat the rich at the moment. But first, we might want to take a tour of their lives, really get to know what we’re about to consume. That’s the hope of the new HBO series Succession, premiering June 3, where creator Jesse Armstrong offers a peek inside the enormously wealthy and powerful Roy family, which controls a sprawling but faltering media empire in these charged and uncertain days. His, HBO’s, and executive producer Adam McKay’s calculation is that we’ll be fascinated by the machinations of the 0.01 percent, despite their indifference to us; it proves distressingly correct. Succession mixes dynastic intrigue with surprising humor, to satisfying but troubling effect.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t call the comedy surprising, given that Armstrong was a co-creator of the hit British comedy Peep Show and a writer on sharp-tongued political satirist Armando Iannucci’sThe Thick of It. It’s only surprising in that Succession is shot so gravely, in a drab color palette, often with a hovering, searching handheld camera. Still, there is humor of the prickly and withering variety, taking aim at the aging emperor Logan Roy (Brian Cox)—who is weakened by a stroke, sending all his heirs scrambling for power.

Probably the biggest joke in Succession is the Roy family’s resemblance to the real-life media family whose surname rhymes with Burrboch and whose vulpinely monikered news network has done so much to lay waste to American political discourse. (It’s loosely based on Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, is what I’m saying.) But the show doesn’t go for a direct skewering, exactly—in fact, it almost does the opposite, repulsing us with Logan’s tyranny and his children’s naked self-interest, while also inviting us to develop sympathies for them, root for sides, and be rocked by defeats.

Succession is aware of the world just outside the Roys’ well-appointed homes, particularly those people fighting against the empire’s indifferent rapacity. But it kind of sneers at them, too. Because they’re the outsiders, they’re not the heroes of this story—not the ones riding private helicopters and jets (always love a scene set on a private flying machine!) and stalking around palatial apartments. Awful as they may be, television antiheroes cultivate a certain kind loyalty over time, and by the close of the seventh episode of Succession, I found myself immersed in the snappy drama of the Roys and those in their immediate orbit.

Which I really don’t want to be! It doesn’t feel great right now to be extending any kind of sympathy to the overseers and beneficiaries of a fake News Corp., not during this particular uptick in Trumpian madness. I know we’re supposed to engage with the other side to better mend a divided nation, but screw that. I don’t want to get to know the Murdochs—er, Roys—or to find any of their scheming and backstabbing exciting or sexy. I doubt the show’s creative team really wants that for itself, either. Yet Succession, cutting as it can occasionally be, still aims to keep us engrossed and entertained and, thus, invested.

So I’m loathe to praise the show, though there is plenty worth praising. Armstrong’s writing has elegant bite, torrents of blustery speech peppered with oddball asides that have an Iannuccian ring. And props to HBO for hiring interesting actors rather than big names for big-names’ sake. Other than Cox, who is genuinely scary as the addled and monstrous Logan, the most famous face on the show is probably Kieran Culkin as Roman, the screw-up playboy of the four Roy children. Culkin gets most of the show’s zingers, and he tosses them out with a zippy backspin—ace comic relief, slimy and cruel, but ugh, cute, too. Australian actress Sarah Snook plays younger sister Siobhan, a rising political operative (she’s sort of on the good side of things) who regards her family with a haughty moral and intellectual superiority, acting above the fray while refusing to acknowledge her complicity in her family’s misdeeds. Siobhan’s got a real weaselly goober of a fiancé, Tom, played with jumpy energy by a terrific Matthew Macfadyen. We may buy neither his nor Snook’s American accents, but their scenes have a layered, thoughtful charge nonetheless.

The lead of the show is arguably Jeremy Strong, playing Kendall, the most ambitious of the Roy children and the heir apparent to the throne. He’s kicked a drug problem and has since positioned himself as the stable, dependable sibling, the one who really shows up to work. But his father is still wary of him, as Logan is not the kind of old bastard who forgets or, really, forgives. It’s no fault of Strong’s, but Kendall is decidedly less interesting than his siblings; his demons are ones we’ve seen wrestled with in similar ways many times before on television. Strong’s performance is as committed as the rest, but it’s in service of a character who by design has to resist dynamism.

As Connor, an older, sad-sack half-sibling to the rest, Alan Ruck incisively highlights the fattened, witless entitlement of a man whose wealthy upbringing turned him listless and misshapen, never quite knowing what to do with all that power and possibility. Connor is the most insightful character study on the show, a finely and pathetically wrought portrait of a failure-to-launch dud who nonetheless has the money and inherited clout to push his way into things, a dangerous combination of buffoonery and access that certainly feels resonant today. I also like Nicholas Braun as Logan’s dopey great-nephew, who may be a little shrewder than he lets on, and Hiam Abbass as Marcia, Logan’s third wife, who’s playing a long, quiet, subtle game.

What can I say? It’s a good cast, inhabiting roles that are smartly written and undeniably hold our attention. It doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. Succession has a sneaky menace to it, but I can’t quite tell how intentional that is. Maybe the show is slyly trying to ingratiate these people—and possibly their alleged real-world counterparts—to a wary, resistance-weary audience to make some kind of point about our ingrained obsession and reverence for wealth and power.

From that angle, any discomfort we feel about enjoying the show means Succession has succeeded, stoking a needling internal (and now external) conversation about the masses’ ideological relationship to the oligarchs pulling levers above our heads. If that is indeed what the show is trying to do, a begrudging hats off to Succession. Otherwise? How dare they make me care about all these assholes.